Dr. William A. Cook Cook's World of Polemics, Poetry and Plays Updated: July 2023
Dr. William A. CookCook's World of Polemics, Poetry and Plays Updated: July 2023

Published Books (Free)

Age of Fools

 

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William A. Cook's Age of Fools is an attempt to relocate our society where it belongs. It is an injection of intense humanism, a celebration of creative thinking that encourages creative reading. - Gilad Atzmon, Israeli-born British Jazz Artist, Author & popular Critical Analyst of Mid-East and Global Affairs Bill Cook is the Barbara Tuchman of our time. This is a courageous book, not the brawny courage of the warrior, but the deeper courage of the peacemaker and the eloquent courage of the truth-teller, who speaks of things many would rather not hear, even though their very future may depend upon it. - Jeffrey St. Clair, Editor, CounterPunch Writes Cook: "From the opening volley of Neo-Con unelected, self-appointed manifestos to take control, to the lies they told the American people through their representatives, to the failure to seek the truth about what took place on 9/11, I have witnessed a cold-blooded group of arrogant men systematically emasculate the rights of the American citizen. What America was in its birthing, it is no longer." Labeling this era "Age of Fools" in the tradition of 15th century Sebastian Brant's "Ship of Fools" and embellishing his work with artwork by Edward Beardsley, Cook writes: "How ironic that the self-proclaimed righteous, the born again Christian Zionists and the Jewish Zionists wheedle their way into their respective governments, preaching the Devil's agenda, using superstition, deception and hypocrisy. In the process they destroy the true and permanent tenets of Christianity and the founding principles of Democracy. America, in short, mirrors the arrogance of the Israeli state under... right-wing Zionist groups that constitute its government... With Israel, driven by its god of war, we are the twin demons of destruction that live in constant fear of all peoples who would rather die than be subjugated, exploited, or oppressed." Available on Amazon.com.

Decade of Deceit: 2002-2012 Reflections on Palestine

 
The essays that compose Decade of Deceit: 2002-2012 consider current events in the mid-East from a moral perspective that transcends the immediate moment and forces reflection on concerns that exalt or deny human rights, personal dignity and respect. These are polemical essays, not news stories. Events considered from this perspective have roots that transcend time, roots imbedded in human nature, roots that grow deep in the earth that gave birth to them for it is from ashes we grow and to ashes we return. (Introduction) Cook undertook a major task. His new book is an invaluable contribution to understanding the Israel/Palestinian conflict. His polemical essays are a must read. They explain the longest unresolved conflict of our time and why it matters. Available on Amazon.com.

The Chronicles of Nefaria

 
 

The Chronicles of Nefaria

by William A. Cook

 

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"The Chronicles of Nefaria" is short fiction, Kafkaesque in attitude, drawing on current events happening in the mid-east, metamorphosed into a surreal world that exemplifies the horror of leaders devoid of humanity.

 

The story begins on the first day of the Sacred Season of Forgiveness and Retribution. A Patient, the Prime Minister of Nefaria, lies immobile in a hospital bed, able to hear and think but unable to see, touch or feel anything. He moves in and out of consciousness responding to voices and sounds.  He's attended to by a nurse, an Elusian girl from the occupied territory that Nefaria controls.

 

The novel covers the seven days of the sacred season. It is a fictional work based on real events and real people. Yet its purpose is to serve as a metaphor for the conditions we face in our world, a world unfortunately that has not advanced beyond ancient superstitions and medieval beliefs. Power rules and destroys both the conquered and the conqueror.

The Mandate

 
 

by William A. Cook

 

 

The Story of the Mandate

 

The year is 1934, late fall, and Richard Catling slouches pensively against the train’s window on his way from London to Bungay where he went to school and where his father farms a few acres of mud furrowed fields in a vain attempt to keep the family’s home as the depression spreads ever more deeply in the rural countryside. (bio and obituary) Rain and sleet strike against the window creating a cacophony of clashing sounds with the clack, clack of the iron wheels below and the screeching wind that enters through the rocking clatter of the door at the end of the car.

 

Catling takes this train frequently to escape the dull routine of his “nothing” job at a mill, “that gave me no pleasure” yet ever dreaming “to see some other life and lives” (from tapes). Caught up in the train's indifferent rhythm he rummages through nonsensical thoughts captivated by the nothingness of his own name. “What’s a Catling?,” he muses. It tells nothing, it’s not a Brown or a Badger or a Cook, nothing identifiable; it’s not musical like some Irish names, O’Hara, Mulligan, or Nuallen, or Irish places like Limerick or Donegal or Connemara that at least connect you to someplace; Catling seems a mistake, a name that lost proper letters like Gatling or Matling, anything substantive, complete, but not Catling.

 

Unfulfilled, he searches back to find how he got here. Four years ago he completed the Grammar School in Bungay, Suffolk, took the college exam and passed, but failed to apply since he did not have the resources to attend. How lucky to finish school as the Depression hit with all the fury of the deluge that poured down on this train. Outside the furrows were filled with water; the horse-drawn plow abandoned in the middle of a swamp; a lone man at the edge of a field running beneath a tarp toward the gray barn beyond the rise. Catling knew these conditions; he had stayed to help with the farm right after school, but thatching corn stalks, draining brush from drainage ditches, digging beats by hand from the mud clogged furrows, laying clay pipes was wet, dirty, grinding work with little reward. (To Plough to Sow, 1984 film showing farming in Suffolk in 1935).

 

The beat of the clacking wheels began to change, ever so slowly as the train came to Ipswich station and the billowing clouds of steam cloaked the window in white lacy bursts of fog; the fields were shrouded as the train slowed to a stop. Attentive now to the altered scene, Catling saw on the opposite siding, the one going back to London, a former classmate, Paul Parker, waiting for his train. Having time while the engine chugged more quietly for the duration of the stop, Catling got off and crossed to Parker. He explained to Catling that he was off to Palestine, to take on a real job with a salary, living quarters, and responsibility as a constable with the Mandate Police. “I had never heard of this” Catling thought; what is the mandate Police? Where is Palestine? From this chance meeting, Richard Charles Catling found a future in a far off land serving His Majesty’s Mandate Government and creating for himself and his family a name that gave him purpose in a world whirling through a maelstrom of change, at the end of which both he and the British Empire would never be the same. This is the story of Sir Richard C. Catling.

 

From Depression to Expectation

 

As Catling made his way back to the train, the evening dusk and the swirls of steam clouded the light signals creating ghost-like forms that rose and fell beneath the depot's overhang. Two long blasts signaled the train’s parting. He hurried to grab the vertical bar and swung into the doorway. How strange this interruption of his journey seemed.

 

Now back in his seat, he thought over these past few minutes, as the steam clouds billowed when they erupted beneath his window and the brakes screeched on the rain soaked rails, nothing but bursts of white swirling forms covering the windows until the sudden jerk arrested the forward motion of the car. Then, unexpectedly, he could see Paul Parker, his classmate from Bungay Grammar, visible in the station’s light. What happenstance is this, he thought. Where is he going? Why?

 

He realized that this encounter changed how he felt: no longer empty, even depressed, but rather hopeful, expectant, changed. Such a brief encounter yet one that suggested possibilities of a job, stability, even a career. His return to Bungay became suddenly a beginning where the relics of this old Saxon town with its Roman well, Norman Castle and the haunting Benedictine Priory gave promise of links to the past and the plaque of Thomas Paine in Beehive Yard promise, perhaps, even here in Britain, for the individual’s future. This late spring offered hope for the coming new year. Now as he nestled into the swaying seat with the rain still pummeling the window, he planned out his return to London and the Milbank Offices of the Mandate Police.

 

Richard’s chance encounter with Parker changed his life’s direction from a boy caught in the flotsam of economic chaos to one guided by a nation’s beliefs and traditions, one honed by order and regulations, and one where devotion would be rewarded. Perhaps Bungay's motto was bred into his soul: “Let us ever hold fast to the old virtues.”

 

When he returned to London after the weekend in Bungay where the unending rain saturated the landscape beneath an overcast sky casting a gray shroud over the land, he sought out the Mandate Police offices with the intent of understanding what the nature of the work would be. He could turn to no acquaintances, no family members or ministers of the church to offer guidance or even information on the Mandate Police or Palestine. No one he knew had any connections with either Palestine or the Police.

 

The Plight of the Palestinians: A Long History of Destruction 

 
A collection of voices from around the world that establishes in both theoretical and graphic terms the slow, methodical genocide taking place in Palestine beginning in the 1940s. Voices decrying in startling, vivid, and forceful language the calculated atrocities taking place. Available on Amazon.com.

Tracking Deception

 

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A compelling indictment of the Bush-sponsored New World Order of endless wars against Arabs/Moslems, relentlessly promoted by a nauseating campaign of deceit and lies at the highest levels of the US Administration in complicity with a corrupt self-serving corporate media, at the behest of a greedy so-called corporate 'elite' and of the aggressive fundamentalist pro-Israel Washington, DC lobbies. - Anthony Yuja

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